Netflix’s searing adaptation of the dystopian classic Lord of the Flies is unsettling for obvious reasons: what starts as a survival story about boys stranded without adults escalates into cruelty, status-climbing, and violence. As the viewer, you can see each domino fall. And that’s just where the lessons for parents and caring adults start.
Just a few examples of those falling dominoes: Ralph spills Piggy’s secret once their friendly duo gets absorbed into a group. Piggy warns the boys about the rotten wood before the fire spreads, but they ignore him because he has less status. And when Jack freezes during a chance to kill a trapped pig for food, he turns his vulnerability into blame — despite Piggy giving him an out. “You lost your nerve, is all. But not to worry, there’ll be others,” he says, assuring Jack that he won’t tell the group. Still, Jack can’t take it. He insists he didn’t lose his nerve, blames Piggy for ruining the hunt, and mocks him as the one who was scared.
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That’s why Jack becomes the character to watch. He shows how quickly fear can turn into anger when a boy thinks vulnerability is too socially expensive.
Jack’s reaction may look dramatic, but the pattern isn’t rare: A boy feels embarrassed, exposed, scared, or rejected, and then, almost instantly, something else steps in to protect him. And it’s often anger or a joke at someone else’s expense.
A recent report from the JED Foundation, “The Emotional Lives of Boys and Young Men,” gives language to this. Boys and young men often face pressure to act tough, handle pain alone, and hide emotions that might make them look weak. When that happens, anger and aggression can become some of the few socially permissible emotions available.
That doesn’t mean every angry boy is secretly sad, or that every boy handles feelings the same way. But it does mean that adults should get curious about what lies beneath the behavior. Jack doesn’t only want to hunt, for example. He wants the group to see him as powerful. It’s clear he felt rejected and lonely when no one joined his “new group,” and he even cried about it — when he was alone. He can’t handle fear becoming part of his reputation.
Because nobody has to announce the rules for boys to learn them.
They learn it when sadness gets teased. When another boy gets shamed for how he performs on the field. When a kid’s embarrassing moment becomes content, and the screenshot a permanent artifact.
Jack, right, with Piggy, played by David McKenna. (Photo: J Redza/Eleven/Sony Pictures Television)
We can’t put all of that responsibility on boys. That’s simply unfair. They’re growing in a world that keeps rewarding these scripts. Parents didn’t invent these scripts either. They get passed down through schools, sports, peers, media, online spaces, and the broader culture.
That’s what makes Lord of the Flies feel relevant to modern boyhood. The boys may be stranded without adults, but the rules they’ve already learned still come into play. Since they’re left unsupervised, no authority slows down the mess. And by the end, the biggest domino falls: boys die.
The task at hand for caring adults is figuring out what we can interrupt before those lessons harden.
How Adults Can Help Model Empathy and Vulnerability
Start by helping boys build emotional granularity, which is the ability to name feelings with more precision. “Mad,” for example, might really mean embarrassed, rejected, scared, lonely, ashamed, overwhelmed, or hurt. The more specific the word, the more options a boy has for what to do next.
Adults — especially the men in boys’ lives — can also model a wider emotional range. Boys need to hear men say things like, “I was worried,” “I needed help,” or “I was sad about that,” without treating those feelings like failure.
Lastly, when boys mock other boys’ vulnerability, adults can interrupt it. “It’s not okay to tease others for feeling hurt. Everybody feels hurt sometimes, and how you show up can help them feel better.” Or, “Needing help doesn’t make someone weak. When I was helped, it got me through something hard.”
These moments may seem small, but they matter. They offer boys more than correction. They offer another script.
Jack is full of feelings he cannot safely admit to the other boys: Fear. Rejection. Shame. Loneliness. And when those feelings can’t be expressed in a healthy way, they start coming out as control, blame, cruelty, and harm.
That is the lesson modern boyhood still needs us to learn: that boys are allowed to feel more than anger, and adults, peers, schools, teams, families, and communities all have a role in helping them believe it.
If the same scripts keep getting rewarded, the same outcomes will keep showing up. The warning is simple: the biggest domino never falls first, so interrupt the pattern before it builds.
Dorian Johnson, known as the PHuncle on social media, is a public health educator and adolescent health expert.
